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Dead By Daylighthas been described as the Super Smash Bros. of horror, and it isn’t a bad comparison to make. Dead By Daylight has collected an impressive roster of horror icons over the years, including the likes ofMichael Myers and Freddy Kreuger. As well as these licensed characters, it also sports a suite of original horror creations.
The first of these, the first Killer in the game in fact, was The Trapper. Often mistaken for a Jason Vorhees stand-in, he has rich lore of his own and deserves his spot as the poster boy for Dead By Daylight. We’re here to answer the question of just who is The Trapper, the man beneath the mask.
Who Is The Trapper?
The Trapper is, of course, just a nickname.Every Killer in Dead By Daylight has onethat sums up a key aspect of their character, even the licensed ones. Freddy Kreuger for example is The Nightmare, while Michael Myers is The Shape.
The commonly held belief is thatThe Trapper was inspired by Jason Vorhees. Both are large, powerfully built men who wear masks to hide their faces. Both are also loyally dedicated to a single parent.
Jason Vorhees has also been known to use bear traps from time to time. Much in the same way The Legion was a clear tribute to Ghostface before Behaviour obtained that license,The Trapper seems to be a tribute to Jason.
Behind the mask,behind the title, is Evan MacMillan. Even if you don’t recognize his name directly, it may ring a bell. That’s because The MacMillan Estate is one of the Realms in the game, represented by 11 possible maps.
Asthe first Killer in the game, The Trapper has been around since the Alpha. Back then he was referred to as ‘Chuckles’, misspelled in the game’s code as ‘Checkles’.
Evan is a tall Caucasian man, with an impressive physique. Although his exact appearance varies depending on cosmetics,he’s typically covered in scars and wearing overalls along with an unsettling mask.
Born just before the turn of the 20th century,Evan was the son of a wealthy mining tycoon, Archie MacMillan. Archie was a cruel man who regularly took advantage of and abused his workers. As an adult, Evan served as his father’s enforcer.
Although Evan doesn’t speak in Dead By Daylight,he does have recorded vocal sounds. He shares his voice actor with The Wraith, The Hillbilly, The Cannibal, The Nightmare, The Ghost Face, and on the Survivor side, Jeff Johanson.
All are voiced by Filip Ivanovic who was the Art Director for Dead By Daylight at the time. Interestingly,Filip Ivanovic has no other voice acting creditsto his name in any media.
Their relationship wasn’t an easy one, fraught with abuse and ill treatment.Evan had a difficult childhood under his father’s rule, a sensitive boy who liked to sketch, he was not the iron-fisted heir Archie wanted him to be.
Who Was Evan MacMillan?
Evanwasn’t always a killer. As a child, he liked to draw, and when he learned that the men who worked in his father’s mine wanted to unionize, he was sympathetic towards their cause rather than siding with his own father.
Theconditions in the mine were awful, even for the time. Archie worked the miners practically to death for as little pay as he could give them, under awful safety conditions.
Evan knew about the worker’s plans to unionizeand chose to keep them a secret from his father.
Archie would regularly push Evan around and belittle him, trying to teach him to be tougher. There was evenan incident where he went so far as to break young Evan’s jaw, but Evan remained quietly defiant and pursued his love of drawing.
Evan once watched his father berate a worker who was sick and wanted to go home, threatening to fire him. When the worker collapsed to the ground Archie kicked him beforeordering Evan to drag him away.
While Evan moves the worker, he starts to feel irrationally angry at him. He calls the man a maggot and thinks of putting him “out of his misery”. These thoughts and actionscause him to start worrying that he’s turning into his father.
Archie was always obsessed with hunting bears, and would oftentake Evan out to the woods to set bear traps. Each time he would tell Evan the story of how he and his brother were attacked by a bear in the woods once.
In the story, the bear eats Archie’s brother’s head and arm, and Archie manages to cut them both out of the bear’s stomach and carry his brother’s body ten miles home. But each time the story changes just a little, andEvan thinks Archie killed his own brother.
After continually hearing this story,Evan starts to draw his father dressed in a bear suit, killing his uncle. He suspects his father killed him because he would have run the family business differently, offering fair wages to the workers.
Evan is aware he should be appalled by his father’s actions, but isn’t, causing him to worry even more that he’s becoming his father.
He also believes Archie killed Evan’s mother, but has no way to prove it. She supposedly vanished, drowned, and was carried away by the river. He believes if he steps out of line his father will kill him too, that he values him as little as his workers.
Evan spends considerable timeimagining ways to kill his father. He stands over him, asleep, with a large stone. He thinks about arranging an accident, or something that looks like one, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
Archie did sometimes show approvalfor Evan’s actions. Once, Evan beat a man with a wooden plank for saying things about his mother. While he was being dragged away by the police, Archie smiled at him.
Archie approved not because Evan defended his mother’s name, butbecause he used violence to exert his will over another. That was who Archie wanted him to be.
Archie discovered and destroyed Evans’s drawings, and reveals thatit was the miners themselves who sold him out for just a few dollars. This causes Evan to fully turn against the miners, seeing them as the maggots his father always said they were.
For his father, Evan only feels admiration and respect. His father may be cruel, but he is strong and willing to do what has to be done. This markedthe true beginning of Evan MacMillan becoming the killer known as The Trapper.
The Entity, the creature that collects Killers and Survivors in Dead By Daylight to feed off, has been known tonudge people down the path of violence to craft new Killers. The Wraith is a prime example of this.
It isn’t clear whether Evan was entirely a product of his environment and the cruel influence of his father,or if The Entity helped push him down a darker path.
What Happened To Archie MacMillan?
The ultimate fate of Archie MacMillan is known, even if the specifics of how it came to pass are a little less clear. As Archie aged, his mental health worsened,leaving Evan to protect him from those looking to take advantage.
When Archie finally snapped, he had Evan serve as his enforcer inone of the worst recorded mass murders in history. 100 men were led into the mines before explosives were detonated, sealing them inside to die.
It was never officially proven that Evan was the one who trapped the miners, perhaps because he likely vanished into the realm of The Entity soon after.
Archie MacMillan was found dead in the basement of his own warehouse, locked down there alone without food or water. Evan seems like the only possible suspect, although why he would turn on the father he had become so loyal to is unknown.
When Did Evan Become The Trapper?
Unlike with some of the other Killers in Dead By Daylight,there isn’t a lot of information about how The Entity recruited Evaninto the Trials. Presumably, he was taken by force or wandered into the Fog unwittingly.
While most of the game’s Killers were fully realized before entering the realm of The Entity, Evan didn’t truly become The Trapper until after he was a part of the trials. In fact,he stands out among the other Killers: he rebelled.
The Trapper wasthe first Killer in the game to get a skin that changed his Mori animation- the unique animation each Killer has when theykill a Survivor by their own hand.
The skin was Naughty Bear, the disgruntled teddy bearfrom the game of the same name.
The heavy scarring across his body and the hooks embedded in his skin are all a result of his continued attempts to revoltagainst the control of The Entity, punishments for his reoccurring disobedience.
This cycle of killing, rebelling, torture, and a return to killing is what truly forged Evan into what he would become. The young boy who liked to draw has long been a thing of the past.Only The Trapper remains.
As well as The Trapper, and the developer’s nickname Chuckles, Evan does have other monikers. He has been referred to as’The Miserable Smiling Killer' and a ‘Monster of a Man’.
Why exactly Evan rebels against The Entityhasn’t yet been revealed. It could be that he resents trading one brutal master for another, or that he desires his own freedom in life without Archie to be beholden to.
Is Hooked On You Canon?
Hooked On You seemed like one of the strangest spin-off games imaginable, a beach vacation themed dating sim featuring the Killers of Dead By Daylight. And yet it stuck the landing, provingboth fun and beloved by the community.
Your first instinct might tell you that the events of this game, where The Trapper is a dateable hunk, can’t possibly be canon to Dead By Daylight. Unbelievable as it might seem,this Trapper really is canon.
The Entity doesn’t pull the Survivors and Killers from just one world;it takes a multiversal approach. There are actually multiple versions of each Survivor and Killer in the Trials, some displayed through different cosmetics.
Two of the other Killers from Hooked On You, The Huntress and The Spirithave their beach outfits from the game in Dead By Daylight. This means not only are these versions canon, but The Entity selected them for the Trials.
Although The Trapper and The Wraith don’t have their Hooked On You cosmetics in Dead By Daylight, it doesn’t change the fact thatthose versions of those Killers are canon somewhere in the Dead By Daylight multiverse.
The Trapper also appeared in another game, Ubisoft’s For Honor, as a crossover character. There he was a powerful boss enemy and some of his cosmetics, namely his mask, were available for players.
